Dialoguing with a Poem
Dear Readers, I am an apprentice to David Whyte’s Invitas: A Path to Conversational Leadership. I have followed his work for nearly 25 years now. I have learned to be in dialogue with any and everything , so too, with poems. In fact listening to David recite and riff on a poem puts one in a dialogue with their own sweet soul as well as their heart and mind.This morning I decided to do the dialogue on the page (blog) in honor of Valentine’s day and the celebration of love. Hearing this poem almost 25 years ago with Leslie Lanes, ushered in my first experience of an ecstatic moment. A moment where everything belonged, including me. Just as it was. Just as I was. If that is not Love I am not sure what Love is. To be able "to gather all our flaws in celebration” is to truly unconditionally love all of ourselves, to love how we were made. To love how the world is made. In honor of Valentine's Day, I offer you this:The link for the poem without commentary can be found here. I suggest you read it first and then come back to the blog and read my dialogue with it. As you read it, note your own inner conversation. There is no single way to dialogue with a poem. There are as many ways as there are people.https://www.davidwhyte.com/where-many-rivers-meet/
The Faces at Braga by David Whyte
Commentary by Nancy C. WondersIn monastery darkness by the light of one flashlightthe old shrine room waits in silence. While above the doorwe see the terrible figure,fierce eyes demanding. “Will you step through?” Will I step through the glories of youth and a well-functioning body and quick intelligence into this new territory? The territory that holds decline, disease and disappearance? Will I? Good God this is hard. My mind knows I cannot choose anything else. I do not want my face to be the face of an old woman chasing a time that is decades gone. If that is what is behind door #1, it is not for me. It is humiliating. It is shame. I had so much of that in my youth at the mouths of my mother and the nuns. No, I cannot go that way. I cannot return to those youthful days when I barely appreciated the beauty of my form, the brilliance of my quick mind nor the grace of a body I did not have to pay attention to because it ran just fine! That is gone. But door #2? What waits there? And the old monk leads us,bent back nudging blackness,prayer beads in the hand that beckons. We light the butter lampsand bow, eyes blinking in thepungent smoke, look up without a word, see faces in meditation,a hundred faces carved above,eye lines wrinkled in the hand-held light. That’s true! So many more wrinkled faces than mine. So many more who went before me could I see them as … Such love in solid wood!Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence,they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them. Engulfed by the pastthey have been neglected, but throughsmoke and darkness they are like the flowers we have seen growingthrough the dust of eroded slopes,their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain. So I too must turn my face toward the mountain of age, even with my youthful spirit, my body is asking other things of me now. It demands me love it, touch it, stretch it, move it.Carved in devotiontheir eyes have softened through age …oh please let me soften…please do not let me harden…and their mouths curve through delight of the carver’s hand. Delight? There could be delight in this paring back? This essentialism. BUT my life mantra has been DO NOT MAKE ME CHOOSE and it would seem this aging stuff is all about choosing. AND I have a lousy picker (chooser). It does not want to choose. It wants everything and mostly all at once. Sheesh…how can I possibly walk this road? I truly know virtually nothing about this way of being. If only our own faceswould allow the invisible carver’s handto bring the deep grain of love to the surface. Shoot, I knew it, what is going to have to go is my ability to skim along, to flit from flower to flower. instead I am going to have to pay deep attention to what I want above all else moment by moment. To choose and abide within my current limits.I do not have time to read the NY Times or the Atlantic Magazine from cover to cover. I can no longer follow all my lovely random curiosities. Well actually I can, but I must accept that this means something else will need to be sacrificed. It takes me more time to do what I did on almost everything. "If only my own face would allow the carver’s hand (aging) to bring the deep grain of love to the surface."If only we knewas the carver knew, how the flawsin the wood led his searching chisel to the very core, my flaw: my mind that does not live within limits…how?we would smile tooand not need faces immobilizedby fear and the weight of things undone. It is true, I worry about this more and more, “what am I forgetting?” The constant backlog of work or home responsibilities not tended to yet? When we fight with our failing. This was the first of David’s poems that I fell hard for. I had a transcendent moment and it began on this line. I (and others I might add) have fought with how I am made as long as I can remember. And…we ignore the entrance to the shrine itselfand wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good. And as we fightour eyes our hooded with griefand our mouths are dry with pain. So much unnecessary suffering from this all my life…even still. But there is slowly emerging a small voice that talks back a bit to that fierce figure…there is not yet an Archbishop Desmond TuTu (Made for Goodness) residing within me that is FOR me on a consistent basis, but there is something that says: "Don't talk to my friend Nancy that way, it doesn't help her." And that is everything. If only we could give ourselvesto the blows of the carvers hands, I wonder, what is it I refuse to give myself over too? What if it is a kind of faith/trust in these very things I am struggling with?the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers feeding the seawhere voices meet, praising the featuresof the mountain and the cloud and the sky. Our faces would fall away my face of productivity, of “earning,” of “the need to be deserving,” of competence…maybe if I could finally trust that as I am made, I am enough for my life…I could indeed grow youngeruntil we, growing younger toward deathevery day, would gather all our flaws in celebration to merge with them perfectly,impossibly, wedded to our essence,full of silence from the carver’s hands. May it be so." src="blob://www.nancywonders.com/1b966a48-e3cd-4ff8-8fd1-890eda11c993" alt="image001.png" class="Apple-web-attachment Singleton" style="opacity: 1;">